Scrivener Helps Manage Idea Dumps While Writing (Mac)

Merlin at 43F points us to a terrific (mac only) resource for writers: Scrivener. Scrivener is more or less a project management tool for writers. It allows you to:

edit multiple documents

create “corkboards” to storyboard and arrange thoughts

use a fully-featured outliner

track keywords (like themes) you write about

full screen edit

… and much more. But the most important thing about the software is what the developers say about it.

Writing a book – or even a single short story or research paper – is about more than hammering away at the keys until done. Research, scrawling fragmentary ideas that don’t seem to fit anywhere yet, collecting faded photos from old newspapers, shuffling index cards to find that elusive structure – most writing software is only fired up after much of the hard work is already done. Enter Scrivener: writing software that stays with you from that first, unformed idea all the way through to the first – or even final – draft.

This sounds like a killer writing app. Unfortunately, I can’t test at the moment because I don’t currently own a mac. But I can tell you this:

Any software maker that understands that there is nothing clean or orderly about writing is way ahead of the game. Ideas don’t come marching single-file into your brain, so having a way to capture and wrestle with them in a single application is worth it’s weight in gold. Or at least $34.99.